CeMEAS mission is to strengthen the understanding of modern East Asian developments. We highly value scholarship that cuts across traditional boundaries. Thus CeMEAS facilitates multi-regional and multi-disciplinary research combining expertise from various disciplines and the area studies.

One of CeMEAS’ core projects representing this approach is CETREN, an institutional framework that brings together expertise on East Asia and India. CETREN’s central theme is the “Politics of the New”. Scholars from the humanities und social sciences conduct in this network reserach on the most enduring topics of modernity, such as the relation between religion and secularity. Asian societies face new challenges and opportunities unheard of in human history. Understanding how Asian young people create new subcultures; tackle political, economic, and environmental plight; and continuously reinvent their relationship with tradition, with previous generations, and with global phenomena, is a way to keep track of the pulsating life of this continent.